Home schooling - Dispelling Bad Press
by Mimi Rothschild
Home schoolers and their children have long faced the stigmas and assumptions that come along with skirting the public education system. There are many myths that are widely circulated, but truth be told, there are so many varying styles of teaching and curriculum for home schoolers that it is not fair to really assume any of these things at face value. Every individual experience is different.
One of the major misconceptions people have about home schooling families is that there is no real discipline or structure. Since parents often haven’t received a teaching certificate or other kind of public degree for teaching, people assume that the parent is unable to properly teach their child. While it may be true that many parents don’t have an official teaching certificate, this doesn’t mean that they don’t make good instructors. If desired, prepackaged curriculums are available. With the one-on-one attention received, a child is more likely to fully absorb a subject. There are varying degrees of structure for home schoolers, ranging anywhere from covering as wide a range of subjects as public school and taking standardized tests, to the “unschooling” method, where parents focus more on instilling the values of the family and teaching the child what they want to learn, and anywhere in-between. It is probably the latter method that bred the assumption that home schooled children don’t have enough structure, and thus are probably behind their peers in terms of education.
Another myth is that kids at home don’t “do anything.” It may be a common inclination to assume that when children are at home during school hours, they aren’t being educated and disciplined properly, especially if the home school regimen is relatively unstructured, and when it appears that learning is play. For example, going to the park to study pond life may look like just a fun outing with no real educational impact. Also, hours may be scheduled differently than public school, depending on the time that works best for everybody, and because the neighborhood doesn’t see the children inside learning at the time that’s considered appropriate, they may assume that they may not be getting any kind of education at all.
Lastly, and seemingly contradictory, there is the idea that children schooled at home are being controlled entirely by their parents, and thus are socially inadequate and have no life outside of home. If anything, home schooling allows more freedom than the public school systems, as there is higher curriculum flexibility. There are also many opportunities available to network with other families and children, ranging in even greater age groups than one might find at a public school. The amount of control in a specific household that a parent may enforce is an individual thing, and has nothing to do with home schooling itself. There are opportunities for socializing available, and families just need to take advantage of them. This myth may have more to do with individual’s reasons for leaving public school, such as special learning needs, problems with classmates in school or other discomforts that children run into that really have nothing to do with the idea of home schooling itself. In short, separating the idea of home schooling from specific, individual instances or people may be the first step to counteracting the bad reputation it has received.
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